Palliating Humanity in The Last Man

2019 ◽  
pp. 129-161
Author(s):  
Brittany Pladek
Keyword(s):  
Palliative Care ◽  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
Species Level ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Middle Ground ◽  
Domestic Drama ◽  
Last Man ◽  
The Last Man

Chapter four examines Mary Shelley’s 1826 novel The Last Man, which tells the story of an incurable plague that kills all of humanity. Shelley interrogates the Romantic belief in the possibility of a medico-poetic panacea (cure all). The novel begins with a domestic drama whose tragedy is figured as incurable, and this metaphoric incurability sparks the far more literal plague. Characters react to both scourges by longing for a panacea, which, when it does not appear, plunges them into a despair that aggravates the initial illness. Shelley’s story critiques the binary mindset underwriting both total affirmation and rejection of panacea, posing a middle ground that offers literature as the palliation of a dying humanity. In the same way that medical philosophers like Jean Georges Cabanis tied the imperfection of medical knowledge to the necessity of palliative care, so The Last Man suggests that suffering and death are unavoidable, both individually and at a species level. In the novel, literature takes on the function of a palliative care doctor, shepherding humanity to its final end by ‘taking the mortal sting from pain’ and preserving its fragmentary memory (p. 5).

scholarly journals The Last Man and ‘The First Woman’: Unmanly Images of Unhuman Nature in Mary Shelley’s Ecocriticism

Perichoresis ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-15
Author(s):  
Éva Antal
Keyword(s):  
Mary Shelley ◽  
The Other ◽  
Natural Order ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The World ◽  
Last Man ◽  
The One ◽  
The Last Man

AbstractMary Shelley in her writings relies on the romanticised notions of nature: in addition to its beauties, the sublime quality is highlighted in its overwhelming greatness. In her ecological fiction, The Last Man (1826), the dystopian view of man results in the presentation of the declining civilization and the catastrophic destruction of infested mankind. In the novel, all of the characters are associated with forces of culture and history. On the one hand, Mary Shelley, focussing on different human bonds, warns against the sickening discord and dissonance, the lack of harmony in the world, while, on the other hand, she calls for the respect of nature and natural order. The prophetic caring female characters ‘foresee’ the events but cannot help the beloved men to control their building and destroying powers. Mary Shelley expresses her unmanly view of nature and the author’s utopian hope seems to lie in ‘unhuman’ nature. While the epidemic, having been unleashed by the pests of patriarchal society and being accelerated by global warming, sweeps away humanity, Mother Nature flourishes and gains back her original ‘dwelling place’.

“Islanded in the World”: Cultural Memory and Human Mobility in The Last Man

PMLA ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 118 (2) ◽  
pp. 286-301 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Sussman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Human Mobility ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
National Community ◽  
The World ◽  
Last Man ◽  
The Last Man

The Last Man, Mary Shelley's novel of 1826, describes the extinction of humanity by a plague that leaves only one man alive. The plague exerts pressure on the idea of national community by forcing a reevaluation of the number of people needed to continue a nation. It also increases human mobility, severing all local attachments as its survivors seek safety. By considering these issues, The Last Man engages with contemporary sociopolitical debates, reflects on the consequences of those debates for literary production and readership, and meditates on the possibilities for cultural memory in a peripatetic world. This essay introduces a neglected historical context for the novel: the debates over emigration, especially state-aided emigration, during the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Shelley's novel aligns itself, in a strikingly pessimistic way, with those who opposed any encouragement of emigration.

Revolting Sympathies in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man

2017 ◽  
Vol 72 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-160
Author(s):  
Jennifer Deren
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Dominant Model ◽  
Nation Formation ◽  
Human Relationships ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Last Man ◽  
The Last Man

Jennifer Deren, “Revolting Sympathies in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man” (pp. 135–160) Building on recent scholarship that explores Mary Shelley’s advocacy for sympathy in The Last Man (1826), this essay traces the complexity of interpersonal and reader-text relations as they play out in the novel and in the experience of reading it. I argue that moments of intimacy explicitly called “sympathy” in the novel are often idealizations that turn “revolting” as sympathy becomes something other than the beneficial exchange that participants expect of it. These scenes delineate a politics of sympathy that challenges the dominant model with a portrayal of human intimacy as uncontrollable, amoral, and infectious. Shelley encodes in the novel’s infamous plague her concern that the experience of sympathy that underlies nineteenth-century politics of community- and nation-formation can and sometimes does generate violence, discord, and inequality alongside mutually beneficial relationships. Exploring readers’ uncertain responses to the novel alongside the novel’s representation of sympathy as revolting, I suggest that the novel’s framing “Introduction” reveals an aesthetics of sympathy in which reader-text relations are constitutively unstable. Readers’ resistance to Lionel’s effusive narration is a revolting response written into the novel’s sympathetic design. By making sympathetic reading a revolting experience, Shelley advances a revision of sympathy that forces us to rethink the possibilities and the consequences of human relationships and invites us to reimagine a communal future that makes room for those realities.

The Last Man

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Keyword(s):  
Mary Shelley ◽  
Percy Bysshe Shelley ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Race ◽  
Ruling Elite ◽  
The Future ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Last Man ◽  
The Last Man

The last man! I may well describe that solitary being’s feelings, feeling myself as the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me.’ Mary Shelley, Journal (May 1824). Best remembered as the author of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley wrote The Last Man eight years later, on returning to England from Italy after her husband’s death. It is the twenty-first century, and England is a republic governed by a ruling elite, one of whom, Adrian, Earl of Windsor, has introduced a Cumbrian boy to the circle. This outsider, Lionel Verney, narrates the story, a tale of complicated, tragic love, and of the gradual extermination of the human race by plague. The Last Man also functions as an intriguing roman à clef, for the saintly Adrian is a monument to Percy Bysshe Shelley, and his friend Lord Raymond is a portrait of Byron. The novel offers a vision of the future that expresses a reaction against Romanticism, as Shelley demonstrates the failure of the imagination and of art to redeem her doomed characters.

scholarly journals Entre thanatographie et pathographie, la mort médicalisée d'Hervé Guibert

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Milat
Keyword(s):  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
The Novel

Dans À l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie, la mort est omniprésente : celle des autres — notamment celle de Muzil/Foucault — comme celle du narrateur/auteur, conséquence du sida ou menace exercée par cette maladie. Cet article étudie, dans une approche épistémocritique, comment le savoir médical que l’œuvre mobilise contribue à l’écriture de la mort. Il analyse les différentes fonctions — éthique, réaliste, didactique, mystificatrice, esthétique, sémantique, heuristique, dénonciatrice — remplies par les références médicales. Il montre enfin dans quelle mesure l’écriture de la mort aboutit à s’en libérer.AbstractIn À l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie, death is omnipresent: other people’s — Muzil/Foucault’s in particular — and the narrator/author’s death as a result or threat of AIDS. Through an epistemocritical approach, this article studies how the medical knowledge mobilized by the novel contributes to the depiction of death. It analyses the several functions — ethical, realist, didactic, mystifying, aesthetic, semantic, heuristic, denunciatory — performed by the medical references. Finally, it shows to what extent writing about death liberates the author.

The Survival of Non-Productive Labour in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 393-412
Author(s):  
Konstantinos (Kos) Pozoukidis
Keyword(s):  
Productive Labour ◽  
Last Man ◽  
The Last Man
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